COMMENTARY: Editor was advocate for racial justice

There are a lot of labels being used to define the life of John Seigenthaler. The ones that have been most often used brand him as a crusading journalist and an insider to one of this nation’s most prominent political families.

Seigenthaler, the founding editorial page editor of USA TODAY who died Friday, no doubt earned both these tags. While an editor with The (Nashville) Tennessean, he exposed the deplorable conditions at a mental hospital and the corrupt relationship between a local judge and the Teamsters union.

He was in the room when President-elect John F. Kennedy convinced his brother Robert to be his attorney general. Seigenthaler became one of the young Kennedy’s closest aides. Seigenthaler was in California in 1968 the night Robert Kennedy won that state’s Democratic Party’s presidential primary and -- like his older brother five years earlier -- had his life snuffed out by an assassin.

But there’s another label the 86-year-old Irish Catholic son of the South deserves: He was a race man.

That handle is usually reserved for black men who are staunch defenders of their race and vociferous advocates for racial justice. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black intellectual, was a race man. So were actor Paul Robeson and poet Langston Hughes. Muhammad Ali is a race man.

Throughout much of his life, Seigenthaler did the right thing in matters of race. On at least one occasion, in 1961, it nearly cost him his life. He was beaten unconscious by a white mob when he tried to halt an attack on an interracial group of Freedom Riders who went into the Deep South to protest segregation on interstate buses.

In 1979, Seigenthaler, then publisher of The Tennessean, had a reporter go undercover to join the Ku Klux Klan to get an upclose look at this domestic terrorist organization. In the first installment of his nine-part series, the reporter, Jerry Thompson, said the Klan was filled with hatred for blacks and Jews, and bent on violence.

Seigenthaler explained his decision to send Thompson undercover in the introduction to the reporter’s book, My Life in the Klan. He wrote: “To get behind their pious platitudes and expose what they really stood for, it was necessary for Thompson to misrepresent who he was. Had there been any other way to expose the Klan, (his) underground role would not have been necessary.”

Shortly after I became president of the National Association of Black Journalists in 1987, Seigenthaler asked me how many of The Tennessean’s black staffers were members of the group? Before I could answer, he said they all should be and promptly wrote a check for their dues.

One day in 2001, I got a call from Seigenthaler. “Are you following this squabble over this book The Wind Done Gone?” he asked me. Written by black author Alice Randall, the book was a parody of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Gone with the Wind. A federal judge called it an unauthorized sequel and blocked its publication.

“I think it’s important that people hear from you on this,” said Seigenthaler, who was editor of USA TODAY’s editorial page when my column first appeared in the newspaper in 1985. At his urging, I joined the chorus of columnists, authors and historians who spoke up for Randall. The injunction was eventually lifted, and her book was published.

“John was always one of the biggest supporters of making the case for training future journalists of color,” Wanda Lloyd, the founding executive director of the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute, told me. “He was a voice of conscience for media diversity.”

And he was an unabashed race man.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, is a USA TODAY columnist.